Airspace by Audio Plugin Guy
As a creative tool, Airspace provides a formidable palette for colouring (and delaying, and spacing) sounds. As you’d expect from ModeAudio, the included impulses are plentiful, expertly captured and carefully selected.
When it comes to controls, Airspace may have the highest concentration of volume, gain and mix parameters of any similar effect. There are so many ways to control exactly which portion of the impulse (or delay) is utilized, how much of the source audio to act on, in which parts of the spectrum and for how long. It’s very easy to dial in effects and build up sound beds or ambiences from various inputs with precision and clarity.
As mentioned above, Airspace can also be a capable “everyday” reverb or delay plugin. It’s simple enough to activate just one module for a traditional delay or a reverb effect. It’s a little like a fan going to a KISS concert with a stripe of black eyeliner, though. You feel as though you could be doing more.
Speaking of which, most quibbles I might have with Airspace come from a desire for just that: more. While I honestly appreciate the professionally curated impulses, I also want to experiment with my own samples. I’d love to try out more flexible routing options, expanded EQ controls or a way to tempo sync output based on the current impulse response, IR Size and envelope parameters. It’s an interesting playground and it would be great to push the boundaries further.
These are relatively minor nitpicks, however. It’s a testament to Airspace’s design and aim to facilitate creativity that working with it makes you want to deepen the rabbit holes it shows you. It’s the sort of plugin that can take your sounds to the moon – and simultaneously make you think about what hearing them on Mars would be like.
For a creative convolution reverb / atmospheric soundscape generator, Airspace does a wonderful job in an intuitive and attractive package. On the spectrum of reverb plugins, it’s fully dolled up like Gene Simmons, the Joker or Krusty the Clown. And still makes you wonder if it could go even further. With, I don’t know – antlers? Groucho Marx glasses? The analogy crumbles – but Airspace soars above.